A Historical Deconstruction of W. A. Marianne Boelen’s Revisit to Cornerville

Abstract The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the value of using fieldnotes and supporting research to deconstruct refutations made by both researchers and lay writers. In particular, I use William Foote Whyte’s unpublished fieldnotes and supporting research to deconstruct W. A. Marianne Boelen’s misrepresentative refutation of Street Corner Society (1943), published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography in 1992. To debunk Boelen’s rebuttal, I divide the appraisal into disciplinary themes and eccentric peculiarities . Disciplinary themes include issues related to specific scholarly debates, such as whether Whyte should have included a study of the Italian family or whether the conclusions in Street Corner Society were influenced by ideas from the Chicago School of Sociology. Eccentric peculiarities, by contrast, concern Boelen’s more arbitrary claims, for example, that the corner boys chose bowling teams differently from what Whyte had reported or whether gangsters offered Cornerville men beer. I found that none of the 20 refutations by Boelen that I dismantled were valid.